This Friday 1015 Folsom invites you on an extended trip through a world of sounds both local and exotic. At the heart of it is a DJ set by Beirut's Paul Collins, playing new exclusives, classics and rarities. Taking a headlining slot, he'll dig deep into his influences and steer the club through whirlwind of the kind of ethnic European-derived sounds heard on albums like 2007's The Flying Club Cup and 2011's The Rip Tide. He's joined for the set by secret guests.

Further foreign support comes by way of Mr. Little Jeans, the recording alias of Norwegian synth-pop vixen Monika Birkenes. A relative newcomer (her tracks only started hitting it big in 2010), she's develped a loyal following for her strong personality and quirky covers of indie pop songs. But while it was cuts like her version of The Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" that catapulted her to her present position, it's cool originals like "Runaway" that have caught our ear. Her performance ought to add a big dash of live spectacle to a night otherwise heavy with on-point DJ talent.

As usual, you'll want to wander the club to get the full breadth of the evening--we've got '60s soul-spinners Hard French, Light Down Low's resident basshead Richie Panic, Brazilian mixer Braza!, VIP partystarter Justin Milla, and a whole lot more. What else? You'll just need to catch a taxi down to the SOMA's biggest club to see.

Beirut leader Zach Condon's music is often synonymous with the exotic mysteries of world travel. Since Beirut's last album, 2007's The Flying Club Cup, sang a love letter to France (with a 2009 stop-off in Mexico for the March of the Zapotec EP) many have asked where his songs would voyage next. Lots of guesses, but few predicted the inward journey Condon has achieved on The Rip Tide, an album with the most introspective and memorable songs of his young career.

Recorded in Upstate New York, Brooklyn and, of course, Condon's hometowns of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, The Rip Tide marks a distinct leaping off point for Beirut. Musically, songs have a harmonic immediacy that contrasts the complexities of Zapotec's Mexican full orchestra compositions. These songs started as small melodies, conceived on piano or ukulele, then built upon by the entire band's contributions in the studio, before undergoing a paring down and retrofitting by Condon. What results is a record that sounds like it could have been recorded in one session, with exciting rhythms matching the upbeat horns and contrasting the mournful strings. In terms of style, no direct geographical affiliation to be exhumed. Rather, what emerges is a style that belongs uniquely and distinctly to Beirut, one that has actually been there all along.

Lyrically, Condon exposes a depth of honesty that outstrips the simplified nomadic troubadour image of his past. The songs speak of love, friendship, isolation and community, touching on universal human themes that are less fabricated stories than impressions of life at a quarter century of age. Songs are no longer about imagining places you haven't been; they're about places of which we are all extremely familiar, some of them too familiar.

This dramatic shift expands Beirut's palate without weighing the music down. Condon has coated serious lyrics with his greatest tunes ever. The second track, "Santa Fe," is the best pop song he has yet written, a jumpy ode to the town of his youth, and an early sign that The Rip Tide is all about the staycation. Of particular note is "Goshen," a torch song that wraps itself in Condon's delicate piano phrases at a level of intimacy never heard before on a Beirut song.

The album is on Pompeii Records, a label started and wholly owned by Condon. Pompeii is a fully independent, artist run, label and it is releasing The Rip Tide internationally. This extreme level of creative control is what the band has always preferred. Shows often sell-out because they choose to play smaller, more intimate venues. This connection directly to fans extends to The Rip Tide release itself, the desire to be able to 100% decide what their music will sound, look, and feel like, not to mention how it can be obtained.

Griffin Rodriguez's production is, once again, immaculate. The performances of the band – Perrin Cloutier on accordion, Paul Collins on bass, Ben Lanz on trombone, Nick Petree on drums, and Kelly Pratt on horns – are spot-on. With contributions by such esteemed colleagues as violinist Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) and Sharon Van Etten, The Rip Tide reveals greater levels the more you explore. And you don't even have to travel very far.

Meet Mr. Little Jeans, a.k.a. Monica Birkenes. She is small and Norwegian and she makes music that will leave you reeling. Her pop dances left of center, a curious thing of equal parts organic magic and buzzing electricity. She has worked hard to get to this place, traveled far to find it. On some unmarked pasture between St. Vincent’s prettiest moments and Debby Harry’s wilder inclinations, she stands fronting an army of bright ideas and sharp sounds, a shipbuilder’s daughter with a voice that could part a sea.

Monica grew up in the middle of the woods in a seaside town called Grimstad. Her dad built catamarans and her mum was a secretary whose love for music was infectious. They didn’t have much money, but put their daughter through years of piano and voice lessons which she’d attend wearing her mother’s oversized outfits from another era. There were four black cats called Missy, and some neighbors who killed a man, but otherwise it was all Nancy Drew, dancing through the trees, and singing to mum’s records.

Her first instrument has always been her voice. Monica sang in the church choir at 5, then around town wherever and whenever her mum saw fit: malls, old folks’ homes, theaters, even on local television once or twice. At 10, she recorded a cassette of children’s classics and shopped it around to gas stations mainly. By 15, she was singing in bars, clearly underage but backed by a band of boys in their 20s. She focused on music in high school, then relocated to London to study drama.

A year later, Monica was on her own in England, having left college to chase singing leads gleaned from the “wanted” page of The NME. Mostly she spent an endless string of years as a terrible waitress and, after an exploratory trip to Los Angeles, a couple more years sofa-surfing, country-hopping, and racking up credit card debt as she wrote with different producers—Peter Moren (Peter Bjorn & John), John Hill (Santigold)—and shaped her sound into that of the inimitable Mr. Little Jeans we now know.

Many people’s introduction to Monica came with her haunting, beat-damaged cover of Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” essentially doing to that song what James Blake did to Feist’s “The Limit to Your Love.” She’d similarly flipped Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” on 2010’s Angel EP, but Mr. Little Jeans’ has since come into her own. Her forthcoming full-length debut—recorded and produced with Tim Anderson (Ima Robot, Dead Man’s Bones), John Hill (Santigold, Wavves) in L.A., Monica’s new home base—promises untold treasures that happily blur the lines between pop and art, light and dark.

Tickets: After purchasing a ticket through Eventbrite, you will receive an email with your tickets attached as a PDF. Please PRINT out your tickets and bring them with you on the night of the event.